Advert Production

For our Newspaper Advertisement we decided to use a person’s eye with social networking timelines/newsfeeds embedded into it. We chose this idea because we feel that it reflects the obsession or addiction that people seem to have developed with social networking over the years. We used a Canon SLR with a super macro setting to take the image and placed it in Adobe Photoshop Lightroom to adjust the different elements of the image such as the contrast and the detailing.

We used the settings in Lightroom to apply a black and white effect to the image which we believed would add more of a dramatic effect to the advertisement. We used the Tone Curve tool which adjusted this effect slightly by changing the highlights and shadows within the image. Doing this means that the photo catches the eye and has a lot more impact.

We then placed the image in Photoshop and using the eraser tool, we began to remove parts of the eye to make way for the social network newsfeeds to be placed behind it. We used the different settings with the tool to ensure that the eraser wasn’t too harsh and had a slight feather on it.

We then made screencaps of a Facebook newsfeed and a Twitter timeline and placed them in the removed area. We wanted to use Facebook and Twitter as they are both well recognised sites and we found that they were quite popular in our audience research which we carried out before making the documentary. We used the eraser tool again to remove parts of these images so that they both merged into each other and it looked a lot more effective.

Next we decided to emphasise the images within the eye further by including a Facebook and Twitter logo. This means that the audience will recognise the social networks quicker as they will be familiar with the logos and colours and will therefore be drawn in and will become interested in the documentary.

We then added the Channel 4 logo and text to our advertisement. Once again, the logo will draw the audience in as they will be familiar with Channel 4 and will most likely have seen other documentaries that they have aired. The original logo we used had a white background which did not look professional when placed on our image. To solve this issue we used the ‘Magic Wand’ tool and selected the white parts of the logo and removed them. We placed a white background behind the text to help it stand out against the image behind it. We used a font called ‘Press Start K’ which has also been used in for the titles in our documentary and we feel that it reflects the social networking world effectively. By choosing the same font for the documentary and advertisements, all of our products will flow and will therefore have a lot more impact on the audience.